Leon, 1996

The title, Leon, is not a linguistic quirk but a deliberate choice: it is the Venetian dialect form of ‘leone’, a term that immediately situates the work within its geographical and cultural context – that of the medieval walls of Cittadella and its monument to the Lion of St Mark, the historic emblem of the Republic of Venice and of the sovereignty that region claimed for centuries.

The work was created and installed at a very specific historical and political moment: the mid-1990s, when in Veneto, as in the whole of northern Italy, support for the Northern League – a political movement with autonomist and, to some extent, secessionist aims – reached one of its highest points. In those years, the Lion of St Mark was no longer merely a heraldic remnant of Venetian history: it was once again being hoisted as a symbol of identity, a banner of territorial belonging vigorously asserted against Rome and the central state.

In Cittadella, amidst that atmosphere, a popular saying circulated that was as crude as it was revealing of the prevailing sentiment: ‘il leon che magna el teron’ – ‘the lion that eats the southerner’ – a contemptuous reference to the southern Italians who had migrated to the North in previous decades, arriving in search of work during Italy’s industrial boom but who, in the eyes of part of the local population, had never truly integrated into the social fabric of the Veneto. A vicious turn of phrase, which transformed the city’s civic and historical symbol – the stone lion atop the medieval gateway – into an image of hostility towards those perceived as foreigners, despite being citizens of the same state.

It is within this interweaving of heraldic memory, contemporary political tension and popular prejudice that Cavenago situates his intervention, acting not from a distance but directly upon the body of the monument. At the base of the plinth, near the wheels, the artist places two inclined planes, two ramps that serve as the narrative catalyst for the entire operation: as if the monument, once ideally sawn off at the base and freed from the three steps that have always raised and supported it, could finally descend, using those very ramps as an escape route, to set out on a new path in complete autonomy. A path which, with a biting irony directed precisely at the secessionist sentiment of those years, might even lead it to Rome: the Venetian lion, symbol of an identity that at that historic moment was calling for separation from the capital, is imagined here as leaving its pedestal not to distance itself from it, but, if anything, to reach it.

The lion of Cittadella, in Leon, thus ceases to be a given and immutable element of local tradition and becomes, through the sculptural intervention, an unstable and even somewhat mocking figure: ready to step down from the pedestal upon which history and the rhetoric of identity had fixed it, and perhaps to head in the opposite direction to that which one might have expected of it.